On a summer morning in 592 BCE, beside the Kebar River, a Babylonian exile claimed he watched something descend from the sky—blinding, roaring, and utterly unfamiliar. The man was Ezekiel, a priest turned prophet, and he described what he saw using the only language available to him: fire, polished metal, beating wings, and wheels that moved without turning.

He dated the event precisely—the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s exile—and recorded it at the very start of the prophetic book of the Bible that bears his name. Copies of that account would later surface among the Dead Sea Scrolls, confirming that this strange report circulated centuries before Christianity, and long before modern ideas of extraterrestrials...